That painting was an activity at the end of its long tradition – a tradition that perhaps coincides with the very genesis of anthropogenesis – appears explicitly in Cézanne’s late conversations with Joaquim Gasquet, which is full of rambling and anxieties. At some point in the dialogues, Cézanne says in context of the pictorial tradition: “Rubens…that is another age, all that. We are in the evening of the world. Painting, like everything else, is vanishing….” [1]. Cézanne’s work is already the painting of the evening of the world, which is the closure unto itself, not so much a deprived world of certain elements or things, but a privatized space of intelligence and logic. This structure is alien to the painter who only pledges alliance to what is seen and revealed: “The painting owes allegiance to that lone. Never to the logic of the brain…and if he abandons that logic, he is lost. Painting is first and foremost an optical affair” [2]. 

What the essence of technology enhances in its computational and logical capacities to make the world legible, it loses in the optical capacity for the thinking of vision, that flickering and always novice opening to the world. The calamity of the automation of the world resides in the blinding legibility where thinking-eyes, as in Cézanne’s expression, are not rescinded and something of the past. Of course, in the name of the present legibility of blinding lights, the past will also be reduced to a pile of stuff that can be assembled and registered – as in the vulgar poet Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ “The Aleph” – but in exchange for abandoning the truth and sensation. 

Well before the argument of Veblen on the centrality of engineers in this new world, Cézanne was aware that the future belonged to the engineers of nature, who can both bend and straighten the crooked lines of the world, and whose final realization is the nuclear organization and the pacing of energy distribution. It does not take too much to see an overtly furious Cézanne around 1890s: “Nature abhors a strain line. And to hell with engineers! We are not road surveyors. A lot they care for color, whereas for me sensation is at the root of everything” [3]. The personal outcry ‘to hell with engineers!’ is still being heard today, although we are less convinced that such an imperative has any chance at halt ling the ongoing vanishing of the sensation in the world. 

Michael Fried has argued that Fraggonard’s The Swing and Blind Man’s Bluff are two pictures that appear to us as also harbingers of an extinction of a world (the world previous to 1789 that is) [4]. Whether it is Fraggonard or Cézanne, there is an imperturbable core in painting in witnessing the moment that the world is vanishing, and retaining whatever remains of the “world” for generations capable of seeing and feeling. Borges’ aleph (a supreme optical affair) once again comes in handy when faced with the vision of the infinite: “Algo, sin embargo, recogeré”. In other words, something remains imperturbable at the end of the world. Is this what painting stood for in late Cézanne? To gather something from the world, to make it imperturbable, is the supreme task of painting.

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Notes 

1. Joachim Gasquets. Cézanne: A Memoir with conversations (Thames & Hudson, 1991), 170.

2. Ibid., 161.

3. Ibid., 166

4. Michael Fried. Collected Writings, Volume II (Eris, 2026), 281.